Ninth Circle of Hell

An injured runner goes for his first couple of miles on a crowded college track.

All the classic nightmares are essentially variations on the same theme. One way or another, you are suddenly thrust into circumstances you are neither qualified nor remotely equipped to handle. The stakes are high, and failure is certain. A child wakes up in the back seat of a speeding car with no one at the wheel. The registrar calls the sophomore to remind him of the final for the class he forgot to attend. The curtain rises on the wide-eyed actress for the play she's never rehearsed. The motorcycle accelerates and here comes the jump. First period Comp Medieval Lit, and there you are at the desk, naked.

I used to have a recurring nightmare that I was at the helm of a deserted flight control tower with radios blaring, monitors blinking, and jets skimming across the windows. Imagine the horror if I'd also been naked. Then there is the one where I'm about to step onto a college track and make a fool of myself. A fit, beautiful crowd of very busy, very serious-looking strangers is flying around, and I'm trying to figure out how to jump in without causing any collisions or disgusted looks. They are all in brightly colored running outfits, and I'm in an old jacket. The part that disturbs me most about this one is that it's not an actual nightmare at all. In the nightmare, I would have been naked. In real life, I only felt that way.

After injuring my knee on the steeply sloped roads just outside my house, I'd abstained from running under doctor's orders for nearly a month and a half and was willing to do almost anything to get out again. I tried a treadmill, and though the knee seemed to like it just fine, I hated it. Then one day when I was complaining about my need to be outside, and my knee's need for a flat surface, a friend suggested I go to the local university track. It seemed like a brilliant idea, right up until the moment I was actually staring at it through the chain-link fence.

What was I thinking? For one, that no one would be there. I pictured a lonely windswept stadium with birds taking flight as I trotted past. What I didn't consider were the teams of people–people on real teams–with the trainers and the coaches and all the accompanying muscle. Interspersed between obvious athletes was a good mix of older and younger men and women, but like the athletes, every one of them was fit and fast. This was not the kind of place where you find new runners–new runners run behind their houses, under cover of darkness, on lonely back roads, in deserted parking lots, all the places where no one will see them. A fire-engine-red track with gleaming white lines surrounding an Astroturf field in the middle of a giant stadium looked like a place where you'd not only be seen, but televised.

At the gate, I watched a mob doing laps and looked for any patterns that I could understand or at least imitate. The longer I watched, the more hopeless I felt. It was like trying to learn the game of bridge by watching. All lanes were active. Did that mean they were "closed"? When you got into a lane, was it "your" lane? I definitely didn't deserve a whole lane.

The thought that I could step into a lane and somehow block it from other runners was mortifying. But if I jumped into an occupied lane, would it be like taking someone's chair? Once you secured a lane, did you have to stick with it? Did changing lanes reveal a lack of character? And was it all right to wave, or spit, or moan loudly? I knew not to high-five any of the coaches or drink any Gatorade that didn't belong to me, but that's about all I was sure of.